Friday, February 20, 2015

Giving Immediate Feedback Without Breaking a Sweat

Our entire math department is transitioning towards SBG. Recently, we were having a conversation about scoring of assessments and giving feedback and such, and I thought about THIS. I remembered conversation about Frank's orange pen strategy a few years ago, and I can't imagine why I only just decided to give it a try.

For the setup, I wrote out a key for the assessment. Since students would be looking at this, I tried to include more detail than I would for my own personal key. I made copies and set up these little stations around the room. My pens were red, pink, orange, purple . . . any color I could find that wasn't green. Green is my signature color.

Students did their assessment-taking in the usual fashion and then, before turning it in, they made a stop at one of these stations to mark what was wrong and make corrections.

And Voila! That's it.

The good:

Any given day, when I take the time to write feedback on a student's paper, I have no idea if the student is actually reading that feedback and taking it to heart. I don't know if they understand what I wrote, either. When a student writes their own feedback, I can clearly see their level of understanding of their mistakes.

I used this in my lower-level Algebra 2 class first. These students who are not usually super interested in their assessment results had more buy-in than usual. A few of them immediately stopped by my desk to explain their mistakes to me . . . just because they wanted to share!

Another student left a perfect note to herself after making a classic mistake while squaring a binomial. She was able to find exactly what she had done wrong and identify what she needed to do differently next time! I am sure this note IN HER OWN HANDWRITING is way more meaningful than anything I could have written on her paper.

And, at the risk of sounding lazy, I am also going to mention how much faster I am able to finish grading a set of assessments! Of course I still look at each paper carefully, but in most cases the student feedback is adequate. I just determine the level of understanding and BAM! Done. No additional comments needed.

The not-so-good:

Not every student left stellar feedback to themselves. A few just put a slash through the problem number if their answer was wrong without identifying their mistakes. I sent a few of them back to write more. One of them gave me a heavy sigh. I can live with this, but I will continue to coach students regarding my expectations here. I also updated my instruction sheet. Much better.

I really love #3. I have found that, if a student can convince me they understand their mistakes, it can actually influence the level of mastery I select for that skill. The writing of feedback almost becomes part of the assessment itself. An unexpected result that I am happy with.

Other thoughts:

If I want students to assess and do feedback in a single class period, I have to make sure that my assessments are not too long.

One colleague is concerned about students early in the day sharing information with those who take the same assessment later in the day. I have four different preps, so I am never giving the same assessment more than twice in a day. And even if an answer were shared . . . a student can't demonstrate understanding by simply writing the correct answer. I just haven't felt that this is a problem in my classes.

The first time through I underestimated the number of stations I would need. To avoid students waiting very long for a station, I found I need about 1 station for every three students.

2 comments:

I like this idea! I've done it before where I read aloud answers and students mark their own papers... but I like the station idea. Another thing that has worked for me is giving students a red pen , yellow highlighter, and green pen. Students then mark their work with a color: red = minimal understanding, yellow = partial/developing understanding, green= understanding. I found that this helps a little with taking the focus off of just being "right" or "wrong."

I happened to find this blog post when reading David Petro's blog post http://ontariomath.blogspot.com/. Thank you for sharing this idea! Such a great way to make students in-charge of their own learning. As Annie mentioned in the comment above, the station idea is really neat as well. We have built a product called CueThink which might allow you to do this exact type of self-assessment and peer-assessments in a digital format. In our iPad application, students create think aloud solutions of their math responses and their peers as well as their teacher can annotate this solution. I was immediately struck by how this feature could support your feedback loop.